Iran and China AI Agents Used for Social Media Campaigns: NYT Report
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Nearly 80,000 people followed a network of Instagram, Facebook and X accounts posing as ordinary Americans in cities such as Washington, D.C., San Diego and Atlanta. The accounts did not belong to the people they claimed to represent. Behind the network was a coordinated influence operation that, according to reporting and researchers, relied heavily on AI agents rather than conventional human-run account management. A New York Times investigation published on September 18, 2026, linked the operation to Iran. The same investigation described a separate China-linked campaign that used a comparable AI-driven approach, although fewer operational details were publicly available about the Chinese case. Together, the cases point to a possible shift in how state-linked influence operations are organized: from humans producing and managing individual pieces of content to software systems capable of handling multiple connected tasks with limited human supervision. An AI Agent Is More Than a Con...